Your Party have endorsed an ex-Tory for the local elections

On 4 April, we covered the accusation that Your Party’s Jeremy Corbyn had endorsed three ex-Tories in the upcoming local elections. As we reported at the time, Your Party (YP) and Corbyn denied that they’d endorsed these men, but the situation was clearly more complicated than they cared to admit.

Now — a week later — we’re reporting on the accusation that YP have endorsed three ex-Tories in the upcoming local elections.

But for clarity’s sake, that’s three entirely different ex-Tories.

Because apparently we’re stuck in some sort of Groundhog Day-type scenario:

The difference this time is not all of these men are independents; Obaydul Kabir is a “Your Party Candidate”.

The other difference is that not all of three of these men are running in the 2026 local elections as far as we can tell.

As we’ll get into, things are once again a bit of a mess.

Obaydul Kabir

Obaydul Kabir is named on the Your Party list of endorsed independents:

It’s easy to confirm that Kabir was a Conservative because his old posts are still up on his Facebook. The following is what he’s posting now:

These posts, meanwhile, are from 2022:

Fair play to him; Your Party’s man does not abide fly tipping.

Garbage aside, Kabir was a certified Tory, and yet Your Party have endorsed him.

Embarrassingly, they’ve done so despite all the controversy last week; controversy which should have given them the kick up the arse needed to stop this happening.

Currently, we can’t say if the endorsement happened because they don’t care or because they think ‘vetting‘ is something that happens to pets. We did send them a right of reply at 9:00am Saturday 11 April, but at the time of publishing they hadn’t responded.

Graham Sheldon

First things first, here’s the list of independent groups endorsed by Your Party as of today’s date (11 April):

Using the Wayback Machine, we can see this list looked pretty different on 8 April:

Looking into Graham Sheldon, we can see that he’s currently a Saddleworth South councillor, with his party listed as ‘Oldham Group’ (he’s also listed on the Oldham Group page). Despite listing him as part of the Oldham Group, his council page states the following (presumably he forgot to update it):

On why Sheldon is no longer a Tory, the BBC wrote this in January 2025:

The leader of Oldham Council’s Conservative group has resigned after police were called following a heated council meeting.

The meeting on 18 December had to be adjourned after members of the public and councillors hurled abuse at each other following a debate about housing and planning.

Councillor Graham Sheldon, who has stepped down both as leader and as a member of the Conservative group, said he believed “the actions of two members of my group caused the mayhem and deterioration of the meeting”.

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“Mayhem and deterioration” were the Tories’ mission statement when they were in power, so we don’t know what he was complaining about.

That aside, Sheldon was a Tory, and Your Party were — at one point — endorsing his group.

Here’s the thing, though; we’re not sure Sheldon is running in this year’s elections. Oldham Times lists all of the councillors running, and Sheldon isn’t on there (despite several of his Oldham Group comrades appearing). He’s also not listed on Who Can I Vote For?.

Fair’s fair, it doesn’t seem to be accurate to say that YP have endorsed the ex-Tory Graham Sheldon for the 2026 local elections.

It is, however, accurate to say that YP briefly endorsed an independent group which included him (although they don’t seem to endorse them anymore).

Confusing stuff, anyway!

And it all could have been avoided if Your Party had vetted its own candidates instead of throwing its support behind independents.

We don’t know who needs to hear this, but ‘independent’ is not a synonym for ‘socialist’.

Mohammed Adnan

For this feller, we’re once again looking at the Your Party-endorsed community groups. YP listed the following group on 8 April:

Pendle Community Independents

As with the Oldham Group, however, Pendle are no longer listed on the endorsement list.

On the Pendle Borough Council website, this collective is referred to as the ‘Independent Group‘. From their Facebook, however, we can see that the Pendleton Community Independents and the Pendleton Independent Group are one and the same.

On his journey from Tory to independent, we can see that Adnan took issue with the PM in 2022, as reported by Burnley Express:

Southfield and Marsden ward councillor Mohammed Adnan has resigned as a Conservative councillor and joined the Labour group on Pendle Council.

Coun. Adnan explained that he had become tired of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and accused his former Pendle Conservative colleagues of not speaking up.

More of that notorious mayhem and deterioration, we see.

In his own words, Adnan said:

Over the past 12 months I have like many local people become tired of the manner in which Boris Johnson and the Conservatives have lurched from crisis to crisis at the expense of hard-working people in my ward.

Unfortunately, the Pendle Conservatives leadership have decided not to speak up against the wrong and damaging decisions made by their government which they appear to be happy to implement. I believe the Labour Party offer the hope we need in Pendle.

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We’re not sure when Adnan quit Labour for the Community Independents, but did end up in the group – a group which Your Party would later briefly endorse.

As was the case with Sheldon, however, Adnan is not listed as a candidate for the 2026 local elections.

So all in all, Your Party seem to have endorsed just one ex-Tory in the upcoming elections.

As we’re sure any YP member will tell you, though, that’s one ex-Tory too many.

Other updates from Your Party

On 4 April, we covered the accusation that Jeremy Corbyn had endorsed the Walsall Community Independents — a group which included three ex-Tories (or would include three ex-Tories — the timeline was hard to pin down).

At the time, we said that endorsing independent candidates and groups which don’t have to align with YP politics would cause problems. Now, a week later, we’ve been proven entirely correct.

This is what Your Party told us last week:

Neither Jeremy nor Your Party has endorsed these candidates in Walsall. Any suggestion otherwise should be immediately corrected.

No permission has been given for Jeremy’s name to be used on any individual candidate’s leaflet.

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As we reported:

• Corbyn spoke at a Walsall Community Independents Group meeting at which the ex-Tories were present.
• The Walsall Community Independents promoted this meeting online and claimed that Corbyn was supporting them in the upcoming local elections.
• No one at Your Party or Team Corbyn seemed to take issue with this claim.

Since then, further evidence has come out that Your Party did indeed endorse the Walsall Community Independents:

Independents will keep embarrassing YP as long as the party keeps endorsing them, because these footloose and fancy-free politicians are independent from having to give a shit.

Your Party — Clown-show

As we said last week, we don’t think that Corbyn was introduced to the three ex-Tory councillors and immediately started rubbing his hands together with glee at the prospect of endorsing them. At the same time, YP’s insistence on backing independents is quite clearly doomed to these sorts of embarrassing outcomes — especially when combined with a lax attitude towards vetting.

We’re sure people would prefer that we keep looking the other way, but we’re not going to do that. The left has won the argument at this point; what we need to achieve next is competence.

In other words, don’t turn up in a clown car if you don’t want us to start whistling circus music.

Featured image via Obaydul Kabir (Facebook)